Dontchev and Hager [Math. Oper. Res., 19 (1994), pp. 753-768] have shown that a monotone set-valued map defined from a Banach space to its dual which satisfies the Aubin property around a point (x, y) of its graph is actually single-valued in a neighborhood of x. We prove a result which is the counterpart of the above for quasi-monotone set-valued maps, based on the concept of single-directional property. As applications, we provide sufficient conditions for this single-valued property to hold for the solution map of general variational systems and quasi-variational inequalities. We also investigate the single-directionality property for the normal operator to the sublevel sets of a quasi-convex function. © 2009 Societ y for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.