option value purpose

Let's say you have a drop down menu on an employee form and you want this drop down to represent the employee's status. It could contain the statuses "Applied", "Hired", and "Terminated". In the employee database we store the status as a number which is more efficient, so applied would equal 1, hired equal 2, and terminated equal 3. Now, if we wanted to display the status of an employee in the drop down, but when we save we only want to use our values then the drop down may look like this:

 <select>
  <option value="1">Applied</option>
  <option value="2">Hired</option>
  <option value="3">Terminated</option>
</select> 

If we stored our statuses as text then we could omit the value attribute. So in a nutshell, the value attribute allows us to assign values to our options that are different then their displayed values.